Loaded Coverage

How the news media miss the mark on the gun issue.

Kenneth Smith from the June 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

In May 1998, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel walked into the crowded cafeteria of Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, and opened up on students with a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle. He shot wildly at first, then started singling students out for death. At one point Kinkel walked up to a student who was lying on the floor, placed the rifle to her head, and attempted to fire three times, but nothing happened. Wrestler Jacob Ryker, shot through the lung in the first wave of bullets, charged the 15 feet separating him from Kinkel, tackled him, and disarmed him. Had Ryker not done so, the toll could have been much higher than the roughly two dozen injuries and two deaths the shooting caused.

In a Nightline broadcast shortly after the shooting, ABC's Ted Koppel credited Ryker with halting the shooting. But once the details of the shooting were out of the way, the program quickly turned into another debate on gun control. Koppel and his reporters never explained how it was that Ryker knew when to attack Kinkel; the hero could have been doing nothing more than making himself a better target in a suicidal charge. It turned out that Ryker and his family were hunters and target shooters. From the sounds the gun made, Ryker knew Kinkel was out of ammunition. Ryker's parents credited his familiarity with firearms with helping to stop the shooting.

In each case, guns were part of the problem, but they were also part of the solution. Many media outlets told only the first side of the story. That would be poor reporting under any circumstance, but it is particularly egregious given the amount of time and energy the media have devoted to covering these incidents. In its study, the MRC counted 653 TV news segments on gun policy in two years. In light of the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and other school shootings, the attention was understandable. But with all that time devoted to a single issue, there was plenty of opportunity to tell the full story.

Emblematic of the media's approach to guns and violence is that of Good Morning, America co-host Charles Gibson, who in a June 4, 1999, interview urged President Clinton to do the right thing in the wake of the Columbine shootings. "When you went to Littleton," Gibson said, "a friend of yours who supports you on gun control said to me in the last 48 hours, `The President'--because, as he said, Littleton has seared the national conscience--`the President had a chance to roar on gun control, and he meowed.' And that was a friend of yours. There are very basic measures that could be taken that people agree on. We register every automobile in America. We don't register guns. That's a step that would make a difference."

If Gibson were less interested in editorializing than in reporting, he might have told viewers that Darrell Scott, whose 17-year-old daughter, Rachel, died in the Columbine massacre, was more skeptical about new gun control measures. To her credit, NBC's Gwen Ifill reported that Scott told Congress, "No amount of laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre."

The difficulty that gun owners and organizations like the NRA have in telling their stories plays out in other ways, Patrick found. For instance, the print media routinely cover pseudo-events of other interest groups that they wouldn't think of covering for the NRA. Coverage of NRA press conferences, press releases, reports, and demonstrations is about one-fifth of Handgun Control's and about one-seventh of the AARP's.

Indeed, Patrick reports in his study, the NRA actually receives more coverage as a result of other groups' pseudo-events than it does from its own. "None of the other interest groups receives similar treatment," he writes. In particular, Patrick cites a 1993 Los Angeles Times article, "Protestors Against Gun Violence Target NRA Offices," that he says appeared "to be taken directly from a press release." When journalists do cover an NRA event, Patrick says, they tend to analyze it as an exercise in media manipulation. Reporters end up interviewing each other instead of NRA officials to report on the success or failure of the organization's public relations effort.

Gun control proponents apparently expect more sympathetic treatment when it comes to coverage of their events. In June 1996, John Lott was searching for someone to provide critical comments at a Cato Institute event focusing on research in which he and economist David Mustard had found that allowing more people to carry guns reduces crime. He was having a hard time finding anyone to disagree with him publicly, which seemed odd given the obvious antipathy toward his research among gun control activists. A conversation he had with Suzanne Glick of the Violence Policy Center helped explain their reluctance. According to Lott, she declined to comment on his findings at Cato because she didn't want to "help give any publicity to the paper." When he explained that C-SPAN would be covering the Cato event, Lott recalls, she said she didn't care because "we can get good media whenever we want."

And they can count on careless reporting on their behalf. Rather than comment directly on Lott's findings, many activists tried to downplay their significance by saying that the gun industry had, in effect, bought and paid for them. Specifically, they noted that Lott's academic position, then at the University of Chicago, was funded by a grant from the Olin Foundation. (See "Cold Comfort," January.) The foundation, the Associated Press reported in newspapers across the country, "is associated with the Olin Corp. Olin's Winchester division manufactures rifles and bullets." As it happens, the two are separate organizations, and the Winchester division makes only ammunition, not guns. (In any case, Olin fellows are chosen by a faculty committee, not by the foundation.) But Lott said he knew of only one paper that, having carried the original AP story, also ran the subsequent correction.

Gun control advocates escape some of the negative press the NRA receives because journalists don't hold them to the same standards. As a matter of course, reporters treat the NRA as a special interest and lobbying powerhouse (which it can be) out to overturn the public will (which is a judgment call). Patrick cites a March 1996 Washington Post article detailing political contributions from the NRA to members of Congress. The story itself was generally balanced: The "president" of Common Cause described the contributions as a "classical" example of how money influences politics, while an NRA "chief lobbyist" (note the distinction in labeling) said she did not agree. The problem, Patrick writes, is that "there appears in the long run to be no comparable story on political donations" by Handgun Control or the other organizations whose coverage he examined.

Likewise, the media are in the habit of linking the NRA to any outbreak of gun-related violence, regardless of whether any of its members (to say nothing of its officials) are actually involved. This may mean juxtaposing photographs of crime scenes, weeping mothers, and grim memorials with stories about the NRA. Or the linkage may consist of a phone call to NRA officials asking for comment on a school shooting. The premise of such treatment is that access to weapons, which the organization defends, is to blame for the violence. One might just as easily juxtapose Handgun Control officials with the violence on the grounds that they limited the availability of guns to victims who might otherwise have been able to defend themselves.

But again, what the media don't report about guns and violence is just as important as what they do report. There are countless cases, full of drama and emotion, in which Americans use guns to prevent calamity. Based on survey data, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck estimates that Americans use guns to defend themselves as many as 2.5 million times a year. In the vast majority of these cases, the gun is not fired--simply brandishing it is enough to deter the attack. Such incidents rarely receive much coverage, and they rarely, if ever, prompt phone calls to Handgun Control.

In 1994 a Washington, D.C., woman heard noises late one night and discovered intruders who were in the process of binding and gagging one of her daughters. The daughter was a potential witness in a court case against one of the intruders. Seeing that the men were armed with knives and gasoline and fearing for her daughter's life, the woman scuffled with one of the intruders and wound up rolling down the stairs with one. She then got up, reached into a closet and pulled out a handgun, with which she shot one of the men. The other intruder fled. "I thank God that I did have a gun in here," she told a D.C. TV reporter, "because I know for a fact that if I didn't have a gun in here, we would be dead right now." D.C. has some of the toughest gun control laws in the country, with the full support of anti-gun activists. Had this woman obeyed the law, she would almost certainly have been killed. (D.C. officials declined to charge her in connection with the shooting.) Reporters did not call Handgun Control for comment.

That same year, a 22-year-old Marine named Rayna Ross awoke one night to find a former boyfriend had broken into her Woodbridge, Virginia, apartment, armed with a bayonet. He had broken into her apartment before and, a Marine himself, had refused orders to stay away from her. But Ross had gotten a handgun to protect herself when the Marines wouldn't, and she shot and killed the intruder. No one called gun control organizations for comment.

At the time of her confirmation hearings in 1997, soon-to-be Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman said the hardships of growing up as a black person in Alabama had prepared her for the worst Washington could offer. She told reporters about a trip she took with her father when she was 5 years old to visit a minister on Christmas Eve. As they left the house, she noticed that her father's small silver pistol was out on the front seat of the car, a sign that he was afraid of trouble ahead. Sure enough, a group of Klansmen ran their car off the road. To keep the Klansmen from finding young Alexis, her father got out of the car and went to meet them. Before he left, he pressed the silver pistol into the little girl's hand and said, "If anyone opens this door, I want you to pull the trigger." Her father was beaten but survived the incident. No one called gun controllers to ask whether, the Klan notwithstanding, it was wrong to give the 5-year-old girl the means to protect herself.

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White House Attacks Free Press Again - Page 7 - U.S. Politics Online: A Political Di links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…But while they tend to describe Handgun Control's Sarah Brady in positive terms like indefatigable, effective, and courteous, they use words like portly, sweaty, and squinty for NRA officials. Loaded Coverage - Reason Magazine In April 1998, a 14-year-old middle school student in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, walked into a school dance with a .25-caliber handgun and opened fire, killing a science teacher and wounding several…